Samba Transfer Speeds OSX

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi, what’s the usual sort of data transfer speed to achieve over WiFi? I’ve set Samba up, and want to have two disks, one for Time Machine and one for usable storage. The first TM backup took 10 hours, with an HDD USB 2.0 I believe, and worked out at around 5MB/sec transfer speed. Every backup since then has been successful, but I haven’t measured speed as they happen at random times. I have no frame of reference as I’ve never measured the transfer speed with this disk wired, but 5MB/sec seems slow to me. I don’t have an SSD to test atm as my only SSD has Windows 10 installed on it to use as an external boot drive for my Mac in bootcamp, and I don’t want to wipe it because it was a pretty involved procedure to get it working in the first place. Does anyone know if these speeds are normal for an old 2.0 HDD, or slow? What’s the sort of speeds people would expect with Samba? Should I wait until I’ve got an SSD, or is there something wrong with my config? Will be testing transfer speeds over Cat8 Ethernet soon once the adapter arrives. Any advice welcome. Also sorry for posting so much on this board, I’ve gone down a home networking rabbit hole and found Wonderland! :smiley:

(That’s 5 Mega Bytes per second, 50Mbps. If this is normal wireless transfer speed to an HDD, please let me know I’ve never done this before. If an SSD won’t be any faster also please let me know, and I’ll just get an HDD with more storage for less money.)

Update: Time Machine throttles speeds apparently. Will need to test with a non-backup disk.

2

Well I would start of with determine your wireless speed using iperf3 then you can determine your Samba transfer speed from there.
E.g. 50 Mbit Samba transfer would be quite a good value if you use a 2.4Ghz Wireless connection.

3

Hi! Can’t get to MacBook at the moment as it’s 3am and the cat is asleep on my legs. But I’ve been doing research: Time Machine throttles transfer speed anyway in order to limit CPU usage as it runs perennial backups. So the speed I got with the backup is not going to be representative of speeds I’d get with ordinary NAS usage. So I think I have to wait and test with a new drive.

4

This depends on the router. It is possible to obtain 25 MB/s over WiFi, but to do that, you have to obtain a really powerful router (Netgear R7800 or something mvebu-based). And yes, for a weak device like BT HomeHub 5A, 5 MB/s is indeed the limit.

5

I have the LinkSys WRT32x :slight_smile: